16 vita-wonk and minusland

'it's up to you, charlie my boy,' said mr wonka. 'it's yourfactory. shall we let your grandma georgina wait it out for thenext two years or shall we try to bring her back right now?'

'you don't really mean you might be able to bring her back?'

cried charlie.

'there's no harm in trying, is there … if that's the way youwant it?'

'oh yes! of course i do! for mother's sake especially! can'tyou see how sad she is!'

mrs bucket was sitting on the edge of the big bed, dabbingher eyes with a hanky. 'my poor old mum,' she kept saying.

'she's minus two and i won't see her again for months andmonths and months — if ever at all!' behind her, grandpajoe, with the help of an oompa-loompa, was feeding histhree-month-old wife, grandma josephine, from a bottle.

alongside them, mr bucket was spooning something called'wonka's squdgemallow baby food' into one-year-old grandpageorge's mouth but mostly all over his chin and chest. 'bigdeal!' he was muttering angrily. 'what a lousy rotten rotten thisis! they tell me i'm going to the chocolate factory to have agood time and i finish up being a mother to my father-in-law.'

'everything's under control, charlie,' said mr wonka, surveyingthe scene. 'they're doing fine. they don't need us here. comealong! we're off to hunt for grandma!' he caught charlie bythe arm and went dancing towards the open door of thegreat glass elevator. 'hurry up, my dear boy, hurry up!' hecried. 'we've got to hustle if we're going to get there before!'

'before what, mr wonka?'

'before she gets subtracted of course! all minuses aresubtracted! don't you know any arithmetic at all?'

they were in the elevator now and mr wonka was searchingamong the hundreds of buttons for the one he wanted.

'here we are!' he said, placing his finger delicately upon a tinyivory button on which it said 'minusland'.

the doors slid shut. and then, with a fearful whistling whirringsound the great machine leaped away to the right. charliegrabbed mr wonka's legs and held on for dear life. mrwonka pulled a jump-seat out of the wall and said, 'sit downcharlie, quick, and strap yourself in tight! this journey's goingto be rough and choppy!' there were straps on either side ofthe seat and charlie buckled himself firmly in. mr wonkapulled out a second seat for himself and did the same.

'we are going a long way down,' he said. 'oh, such a longway down we are going.'

the elevator was gathering speed. it twisted and swerved. itswung sharply to the left, then it went right, then left again,and it was heading downward all the time — down and downand down. 'i only hope,' said mr wonka, 'the oompa-loompasaren't using the other elevator today.'

'what other elevator?' asked charlie.

'the one that goes the opposite way on the same track asthis.'

'holy snakes, mr wonka! you mean we might have acollision?'

'i've always been lucky so far, my boy … hey! take a lookout there! quick!'

through the window, charlie caught a glimpse of what seemedlike an enormous quarry with a steep craggy-brown rock-face,and all over the rock-face there were hundreds ofoompa-loompas working with picks and pneumatic drills.

'rock-candy,' said mr wonka. 'that's the richest deposit ofrock-candy in the world.'

the elevator sped on. 'we're going deeper, charlie. deeper anddeeper. we're about two hundred thousand feet down already.'

strange sights were flashing by outside, but the elevator wastravelling at such a terrific speed that only occasionally wascharlie able to recognize anything at all. once, he thought hesaw in the distance a cluster of tiny houses shaped likeupside-down cups, and there were streets in between thehouses and oompa-loompas walking in the streets. anothertime, as they were passing some sort of a vast red plaindotted with things that looked like oil derricks, he saw a greatspout of brown liquid spurting out of the ground high into theair. 'a gusher!' cried mr wonka, clapping his hands. 'awhacking great gusher! how splendid! just when we neededit!'

'a what?' said charlie.

'we've struck chocolate again, my boy. that'll be a rich newfield. oh, what a beautiful gusher! just look at it go!'

on they roared, heading downward more steeply than evernow, and hundreds, literally hundreds of astonishing sights keptflashing by outside. there were giant cog-wheels turning andmixers mixing and bubbles bubbling and vast orchards oftoffee-apple trees and lakes the size of football grounds filledwith blue and gold and green liquid, and everywhere therewere oompa-loompas!

'you realize,' said mr wonka, 'that what you saw earlier onwhen you went round the factory with all those naughty littlechildren was only a tiny corner of the establishment. it goesdown for miles and miles. and as soon as possible i shallshow you all the way around slowly and properly. but that willtake three weeks. right now we have other things to thinkabout and i have important things to tell you. listen carefullyto me, charlie. i must talk fast, for we'll be there in a coupleof minutes.

'i suppose you guessed,' mr wonka went on, 'what happenedto all those oompa-loompas in the testing room when i wasexperimenting with wonka-vite. of course you did. theydisappeared and became minuses just like your grandmageorgina. the recipe was miles too strong. one of themactually became minus eighty-seven! imagine that!'

'you mean he's got to wait eighty-seven years before he cancome back?' charlie asked.

'that's what kept bugging me, my boy. after all, one can'tallow one's best friends to wait around as miserable minusesfor eighty-seven years …'

'and get subtracted as well,' said charlie. 'that would befrightful.'

'of course it would, charlie. so what did i do? "willy wonka,"i said to myself, "if you can invent wonka-vite to make peopleyounger, then surely to goodness you can also inventsomething else to make people older!"'

'ah-ha!' cried charlie. 'i see what you're getting at. then youcould turn the minuses quickly back into pluses and bringthem home again.'

'precisely, my dear boy, precisely — always supposing, ofcourse, that i could find out where the minuses had gone to!'

the elevator plunged on, diving steeply toward the centre ofthe earth. all was blackness outside now. there was nothing tobe seen.

'so once again,' mr wonka went on, 'i rolled up my sleevesand set to work. once again i squeezed my brain, searchingfor the new recipe … i had to create age … to make peopleold … old, older, oldest … "ha-ha!" i cried, for now the ideaswere beginning to come. "what is the oldest living thing in theworld? what lives longer than anything else?"'

'a tree,' charlie said.

'right you are, charlie! but what kind of a tree? not thedouglas fir. not the oak. not the cedar. no no, my boy. it isa tree called the bristlecone pine that grows upon the slopes ofwheeler peak in nevada, u.s.a. you can find bristlecone pineson wheeler peak today that are over four thousand years old!

this is fact, charlie. ask any dendrochronologist you like (andlook that word up in the dictionary when you get home, willyou, please?). so that started me off. i jumped into the greatglass elevator and rushed all over the world collecting specialitems from the oldest living things …

a pint of sap from a 4000-year-old bristleconepine

the toe-nail clippings from a 168-year-old

russian farmer

called petrovitch gregorovitch

an egg laid by a 200-year-old tortoise belongingto the king of

tonga

the tail of a 51-year-old horse in arabia

the whiskers of a 36-year-old cat called

crumpets

an old flea which had lived on crumpets for 36years

the tail of a 207-year-old giant rat from tibetthe black teeth of a 97-year old grimalkin

living in a cave on

mount popocatepetl

the knucklebones of a 700-year-old cattaloo

from peru …

… all over the world, charlie, i tracked down very old andancient animals and took an important little bit of somethingfrom each one of them — a hair or an eyebrow or sometimesit was no more than an ounce or two of the jam scrapedfrom between its toes while it was sleeping. i tracked downthe whistle-pig, the bobolink, the skrock, thepolly-frog, the giant curlicue, the stinging slugand the venomous squerkle who can spit poison rightinto your eye from fifty yards away. but there's no time to tellyou about them all now, charlie. let me just say quickly thatin the end, after lots of boiling and bubbling and mixing andtesting in my inventing room, i produced one tiny cupful ofoily black liquid and gave four drops of it to a bravetwenty-year-old oompa-loompa volunteer to see whathappened.'

'what did happen?' charlie asked.

'it was fantastic!' cried mr wonka. 'the moment he swallowedit, he began wrinkling and shrivelling up all over and his hairstarted dropping off and his teeth started falling out and,before i knew it, he had suddenly become an old fellow ofseventy-five! and thus, my dear charlie, was vita-wonkinvented!'

'did you rescue all the oompa-loompa minuses, mr wonka?'

'every single one of them, my boy! one hundred andthirty-one all told! mind you, it wasn't quite as easy as all that.

there were lots of snags and complications along the way… .

good heavens! we're nearly there! i must stop talking nowand watch where we're going.'

charlie realized that the elevator was no longer rushing androaring. it was hardly moving at all now. it seemed to bedrifting. 'undo your straps,' mr wonka said. 'we must getready for action.' charlie undid his straps and stood up andpeered out. it was an eerie sight. they were drifting in aheavy grey mist and the mist was swirling and swishing aroundthem as though driven by winds from many sides. in thedistance, the mist was darker and almost black and it seemedto be swirling more fiercely than ever over there. mr wonkaslid open the doors. 'stand back!' he said. 'don't fall out,charlie, whatever you do!'

the mist came into the elevator. it had the fusty reeky smellof an old underground dungeon. the silence was overpowering.

there was no sound at all, no whisper of wind, no voice ofcreature or insect, and it gave charlie a queer frighteningfeeling to be standing there in the middle of this grey inhumannothingness — as though he were in another world altogether,in some place where man should never be.

'minusland!' whispered mr wonka. 'this is it, charlie! theproblem now is to find her. we may be lucky … and thereagain, we may not!'